These days any online search in Thai or English for Article 112 usually leads to updated news from one day to the next. We just learned, for example, from The Nation that Thailand’s lackluster human rights commission will need all this year to define its position on an issue worthy of such attention several decades ago. Academics have stepped in on both sides of the pendulum – for and against – with the Nitirat Group meeting this coming Sunday to gather signatures from Thai nationals to amend Article 112. Displeased with this effort, a counter academic group, led by NIDA offers to protect the monarchy from apparently Western values! Manager Online report on this development can be seen here. See other Thai language report here.  .Adding fuel to the fire, the UN’s special Rapporteur Frank Larue stopped by Thailand on another unofficial mission, this time dropping into the Prachatai office to lend support to democracy in Thailand.

To top that off, last night this writer was asked by a local Thai community member whether she should think of storing supplies because she heard that there is going to be huge strife in Thailand in the near future.

Setting the entire Thai nation against so-called western values, many of which are not western so much as they are human and universal, is not the way to seek enlightenment. If the Lord Buddha (a foreigner) had acted the same way with his resources then he would have built a great wall and let humanity fall apart – which it seems still intent on doing. It seems that no matter how much education we accumulate, no matter how much we travel, no matter what kind of information we gain access to or watch others access, we still can’t get off the pedestal of determining what is best for our fellow man on the one hand, and assuming that we know best on the other. If the people disagree with us, they become subject to different forms of punishment ranging from censure to warning to accusation to prosecution to prison, and sometimes to the gallows. We dress this great power in the guise of protecting national security and ignore the intense and unjust, yet inculcated, hatred that created these horrible acts. It is encouraged mob violence.

Probably the greatest institution in Thailand under real threat is the institution of ignorance. Yet despite being assailed within and without by politicians, academics, private persons, activists, diplomats, business quarters and industry, cultural groups and world-renown authors, ignorance not only thrives…it is applauded as uniquely Thai. The less you know the better. The more you believe the better. The fewer of you who actually delve into fact and fiction and really sort both out, the better. The more of you who follow directions, who show loyalty the way it is spelled out for you – and not the way that reformists like engaged Buddhist Sulak demonstrate – the better. The more powerful and unaccountable state machinery becomes in regimenting you the better.

A great human tragedy has taken place in Thailand. Archaic social values have been legislatively mandated and as a result become matters of politics and not society. Thus what were before important but legal social shifts have been transformed into illegal political threats to national security. This phenomenon is perhaps the only thing about Thailand that is unique; nowhere else in the world that I am aware of has the creed of replication been so convincingly sewn into what has in error been cited as a democratic social fabric as to inculcate rejection of anything other than the mantra. The actual processes that produced this convoluted moral conundrum are not themselves unique or surprising. World history is replete with one regime after another being able to control and steer entire populations toward a particular form of worship or creed.

As to what happens when such divergent interests – those harboring fear of self-determination versus those harboring aspirations for self-determination – come together and are led by extremists created as a result of ignorance and self-illusion…again history is replete with examples showing the tremendous damage, ruin and loss of character, of hope, of honor, of thousands of lives, that each society going through these dark cycles experiences. Thus the answer to the neighbor’s question about whether disturbances will soon ignite fires is still open but uneasily felt to be in the affirmative.

What brought forth threats to national security, then, is not the presence of such threats but their creation through Orwellian-type governance that promotes ignorance, hatred, compliance, false Thainess and perpetual Witch Hunts that silence not just dissent but legitimate inquiry.

This writer believes in benevolent censorship (This is a form of wise, non-prejudicial, kind and gentle, fair, perfect and magical kind of censorship – which, of course, can never exist). Not everything should be posted in a manner freely available to anyone who wants it. A clear example is instructions on how to beat someone so bruises do not show, how to make dirty bombs, etc.  Taste and restraint are needed, but where public information is not inhumane or immoral or unethical, it should be made available and others allowed to make it available. State agencies that outlaw this have to be held accountable and be subject to alteration.

It is recognized that standards are subjective in many cases, but as the UN, RSF and others have demonstrated, in Thailand inhumanity, growing lack of morality and ethics are given scant attention in the face of professed need to protect national security. In general the Thai population more or less supports this mantra because Thais have been Pavlov-conditioned to “recognize,” these days even to falsely anticipate something called “the threat” and slam home is one lese majesté, one criminal defamation accusation after another.

Because concerted campaigns in the name of a need to protect national security have taken on a very real “Atlas Shrugged” character of gross incompetence at the expense of rational honor, Thailand and its institutions have become subject to criticism, poor images, false impressions and even mass rejection.

Outside Thailand where people can actually speak with one another (unless they want to come to Thailand and are aware that if they do they could go to prison) they listen and are told many truths that people in Thailand will die before their ancestors will ever hear. Insistence that this is all to protect national security is unwise, unjust and unneeded. It is a terrible shame that common sense, legitimate freedoms and factual information not controlled by the State have become untenable in Thailand. Stop denouncing the West, or foreigners. Look inward. Those voices in your heart are not to be shouted down by those around you.